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Tag Archives | Silk Road

In the digital drug trade as in the physical one, taking out one kingpin only makes room for another ready to satisfy the market’s endless demand. In the case of the FBI’s takedown of the Silk Road, the latest of the up-and-coming drug kingpins is far more evolved than its predecessor—and far less principled.

Since it launched early this year, the anonymous black market bazaar Evolution has grown dramatically, nearly tripling its sales listings in just the last five months. It now offers more than 15,000 mostly illegal products ranging from weapons to weed, cocaine, and heroin. That’s thousands more than the Silk Road ever hosted. And Evolution’s popularity has been driven not only by a more secure and professional operation than its competitors, but also by a more amoral approach to the cryptomarket than the strict libertarian ethos the Silk Road preached. Case in point: About 10 percent of Evolution’s products are stolen credit card numbers and credentials for hacked online accounts.

At a Toronto Bitcoin hackathon earlier this month, the group took home the $20,000 first prize with a proof-of-concept for a new online marketplace known as DarkMarket, a fully peer-to-peer system with no central authority for the feds to attack. If DarkMarket’s distributed architecture works, law enforcement would be forced to go after every contraband buyer and seller one by one, a notion that could signal a new round in the cat-and-mouse game of illicit online sales.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” said Amir Taaki, one of DarkMarket’s creators and the founder of the anarchist group Unsystem, in a short speech at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo unveiling the project. He compared DarkMarket’s improvements on the now-defunct Silk Road to the advent of Bittorrent, a decentralized technology that revamped Napster’s more vulnerable model of filesharing and flummoxed copyright enforcers.

And this could not be more true as Brian Anderson writes on Motherboard about how the Silk Road will never be shut down, since the Dread Pirate Roberts has made it possible to upload the site anew in just “15 minutes.”

It only took a month for the Silk Road 2.0 to go live after the now infamous Silk Road marketplace shuttered. One month. Should the budding deep-web bazaar experience the same fate as its predecessor, and be knocked out by authorities still whack-a-moling their way through the online front of the war on drugs, the Silk Road 3.0 would be up and running in 15 minutes, tops.

That’s according to the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous head of SR 2.0. In what are arguably his most breathy public remarks to date the “new” DPR, who either cribbed his handle from the DPR of SR 1.0 fame or who is indeed the original DPR, opened up to Mike Power on his long-term vision for the site.

Silk Road’s Ross William “Dread Pirate Roberts” Ulbricht has been arrested and all his Bitcoin booty has been seized. Ulbricht is accused of attempting to hire a hitman to murder a possible snitch, among other things.

U.S. law enforcement officials have shut down down Silk Road, the online drug market, following a raid and an arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, the site’s alleged proprietor.

According to a Justice Department release, Ulbricht, 29, was arrested in San Francisco and will be presented in San Francisco federal court Wednesday morning. Until Wednesday, the person who ran the site was known only by the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.”

In addition to arresting Ulbricht, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized approximately $3.6 million in Bitcoin, making it the second biggest seizure in the digital currency’s history.

Silk Road is an online marketplace that uses Tor and Bitcoin to preserve the anonymity of all involved. The site itself is set up as a Tor hidden service, which makes it practically impossible to locate the site’s servers. And the use of Bitcoins prevents the authorities from identifying market participants by following the money.

Most of the items listed for sale are illegal drugs. To place an order, the buyer transmits the appropriate number of Bitcoins to the site operators, who hold the funds in escrow while the goods are shipped. Once the buyer confirms the product has arrived, the escrowed funds are released to the seller.

Christin began crawling Silk Road in November 2011. From February to July of this year, he attempted to crawl the site on a daily basis, yielding a wealth of data about activity on the site.

No publicity is bad publicity: Silk Road, the illicit online marketplace that came to light after Gawker’s Adrian Chen announced you could buy any drug imaginable there with Bitcoins, has been booming after increased awareness due to a rash of alarmist press coverage.

Drugs! Anonymous currencies! Hackers! Our children! But gradually Silk Road, and to a lesser degree Bitcoin, faded from the stage, largely because most people couldn’t understand how to use them. Silk Road can only be accessed using the anonymous network Tor, and you should probably know a thing or two about encryption before you buy anything.

But as we learned via a few Bitcoining Betabeat readers, Silk Road is doing really well—well enough to expand its anonymous team. “Silk Road is currently hiring a database expert and a customer support team member,” writes one reader.